Not Credible

Lancet/Johns Hopkins report - 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq since 2003

President says not credible.

Public Health researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health surveyed 47 clusters of 40 homes on randomly selected residential streets from 18 cities and regions in Iraq for a total of over 12,500 Iraqis. They found that the crude mortalithy rate in Iraq has risen from 5.5 per 1000 per year pre-invasion to 19.8 per 1000 per year after the invasion. Excess mortalities, defined as deaths above the baseline established in 2003 now exceed 14.2 per 1000. In total they found that 655,000 Iraqis have died over above the number that would have been expected based on the pre-invasion mortality rates.

The same group did a previous study in 2004 and extimated, based on a smaller sample, over 100,000 excess deaths up until 2004. When the current survey results were applied to the period covered in the previous study they now estimate that 112,000 excess deaths up to September 2004, thus validating their previous work.

The president doesn't think these public health researchers from the nation's most prestigious health sciences school are credible. Even though their work was peer reviewed and published in the highly respected British medical journal Lancet - a journal with a publication history dating back to the early 1800's. A man who needs a road map to sort his name out of the alphabet blocks had the audacity to say their methodology has been discredited. I wonder how many times he had to reherse those words?

But then again, the president doesn't think that evolution or global warming are based on credible science either.